


against the wall again

by hardscrabble



Series: little bird [ariadne who?-verse] [3]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Slash, Pseudonyms, ariadne ain't, complaining about movie physics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-02 10:35:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16785235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hardscrabble/pseuds/hardscrabble
Summary: The carjacking goes as smoothly as he could have hoped.It’s the last thing that does.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The dream, through Arthur's eyes. (Chapter 6 of play the goddamn part, if you're keeping track. In this 'verse, Ariadne isn't quite herself. Marking time/playing around, not doing anything new here.)

The carjacking goes as smoothly as he could have hoped.

It’s the last thing that does.

***

As he accelerates away from Dom’s maroon Hyundai, Yusuf bolting from the backseat to make his way to the van and then into the warehouse around the block, Arthur has very little to distract him from a nagging worry—Ari hasn’t turned up yet. Her body is still too small and too new to dreamshare for Somnacin metabolic shit to slow her down, so she must have dreamed herself to a weird location within the dream’s map. Arthur can’t remember telling her specific coordinates, which means he probably didn’t, which means her being somewhere weird is his fault. It’s a small thing, but it’s one detail he overlooked in the rush of prepping her for entering the field on an actual job, and that means there might be more.

He punches off the cab’s _terrible_ music, worse for being a dreamed stereotypical regurgitation of terrible cabbie music, without bothering to wipe the rain off his face. Should have told her, should have specified—

But she built the dream, he reminds himself, and she’ll catch up with Dom; he’ll be looking for her. It’s not as if anyone’s going anywhere quickly; Yusuf’s mix of New York and LA seems to have included the worst of traffic in both cities, even if the rain could be discounted (and it can’t be; it seems that _no one_ can just suck it up and drive like a normal person in rain, even if they’re fucking projections). Saito is silent in the passenger seat of the cab, holding his Browning in his lap as if it’s a newspaper. That easily.

Fischer, drenched, flags down the cab at the next corner and slides in, ordering, “Third and Market. Snappy.”

From the crosswalk Eames sprints up and around, slides in on the driver’s side, and dissembles in his dripping suit, all cheer. Fischer squawks and protests and says, “Look, could you pull over and get this—” and Saito turns like an automaton as he lifts the gun.

And Eames smiles, too knowing.

Arthur nearly laughs at Fischer’s absolute disgust at the realization that he’s being kidnapped, and again at his disdainful sniping about how much his _wallet_ cost when the kid tosses the thing across the backseat. _Kid_ —he isn’t one; Fischer is just a year younger than Arthur himself and set to take over one of the most powerful corporations on the planet, but he’s so fully the part of a WASP-y rich boy and he’s in for _so much shit_ from Eames, just on this ride— “You might at least drop me at my stop,” he concludes, with a hint of bravado that Arthur might, in different circumstances, admire.

“I’m afraid,” Eames begins, really leaning into the James Bond angle that only he can pull off, even soaked to the skin in a shitty two-piece suit, “in this—”

—and before the safety glass finishes crumbling Arthur’s training takes over. Of the next two minutes, the only thing he _knows_ , in the moment, the only thing he marks in his head as _this is fucking happening_ against the mechanics of getting the cab’s occupants through the crisis at hand, is the grinding judder through the car’s chassis as he guns the engine in reverse, crushing a projection against the grille of the sedan behind them. A new way to kill, for him.

Eames shoots the projection in the throat and it’s only as Arthur screams a question (screams?), foot on the gas, that he comes back to himself.

The drawling expansiveness of Eames’s reply is how he _gets_ after a missed-by-inches firefight, which shakes Arthur into true awareness of his own raw throat, of the shot-out windows of the cab, of the fact that the projection he crushed with the car was carrying a fucking _assault rifle_ , and it wasn’t the only one armed like that.

And then he sees the blood on Saito’s fingers.

***

The Hyundai, Arthur notes, as he follows it into the warehouse at speed, is crumpled at all corners and punched in along the driver’s side and only now does he remember Dom, in his rearview mirror, swinging the tail end of the sedan into a parked van that took out the sniper who’d jumped from its passenger seat. Between handing Fischer off to Yusuf and helping Saito move, Arthur falls back to what’s ingrained: gathering data.

The Hyundai got fucked up, and Dom held up, by a _freight train_ , says Dom, and since when did the city plan—

The city plan is the architect’s responsibility, so Arthur, turning to the architect, snaps out, “Why would you put a train crossing in the middle of a _downtown intersection_?” before his brain short-circuits on him.

Because the architect is _Ari_ , protesting, “What—I _didn’t_!” She looks like a drowned rat, and he’s trying to work out her expression—indignance, he thinks, beneath Ariadne’s artlessness, but there’s terror beneath _that_ , from _what_ —as he demands, “Then where’d it come from?”

Dom says then, dark and heavy, “Lemme ask _you_ a question—” and suddenly he’s yelling, about the projections, their obvious training—which Ari demands an explanation for. Jesus, she’s so _new_ —

There’s no point in trying to avoid it. Arthur describes subconscious security, gesturing uselessly as he grasps for words. A militarization of this scale should have shown in Fischer’s records—a check to a pseudonym, an outlay of cash to cross-reference with the extractors who specialize in that shit, and he says so, starts to apologize. Dom cuts him off, vicious and snarling, and that’s—that’s not right; he’s freaking, for some reason, and Arthur puts out one hand, _look, we’re on the same side_ —it’s worked before—and says firmly, “Okay. Calm down.”

And Dom—

Dom loses it.

“ _Don’t_ tell me to calm down—” And he’s off and screaming into his face that it was his job, his responsibility, to find _everything_ about Fischer, as if Arthur isn’t fully _aware_. “We are _not_ prepared for this type of violence—”

“We _have_ dealt with sub-security before,” says Arthur, loud and flat, trying to match Dom for volume without shouting—yelling matches don’t help anything, and _someone_ has to be in control—but his voice breaks, a sideways squawk, absurdly young. “We’ll be a little more careful and we’re gonna be _fine_.”

“ _This was not a part of the plan_ ,” and the raw edge of his shout, the pacing like a caged lion—very suddenly, Arthur smells a rat, as Dom waves an arm at Saito on the floor and howls, “He’s _dying_ , for God’s sake!”

Because any god has any relevance down here.

Eames, brusque and efficient, moves to stand over Saito, drawing his H&K. “We’ll put him out of his misery—” And tap Saito topside and have him reinsert himself right in the warehouse, Arthur thinks, satisfied, in the split second before Dom shoves Eames bodily and _yells_.

That’s not _right_. And then he starts gabbling, and that’s _drastically_ wrong, that lightning switch from wrath to panicky begging—Dom doesn’t pull this shit on the job, he’s not this sloppy, even when things go to shit he keeps himself in _control_ , especially in front of new people—Ari, Yusuf, Saito for all that he’s been fucking shot—and Eames is trying to gentle him, palms out, “He’s in agony, I’m waking him up—”

And Dom rejects one of the fundamental facts of Somnacin-aided dreaming, insists, “He won’t wake up,” and Eames demands clarification ( _specificity_ ) and Yusuf confirms that killing Saito now _won’t_ wake him up, _not from this_ , and Arthur—doesn’t know what’s happening in him.

But he knows what’s happening to Eames, as his gaze hardens, as the line of his shoulders tightens and he drawls, “Right.” That’s fear feeding fury, the kind of feedback loop that Eames siphons from before he goes for the throat. It all crystallizes, flattens his tone with its weight. “So what happens when we die.”

In the sudden hush, Dom says, “We drop into Limbo.”

Headrush, Arthur’s vision going sharp and dark. “Are you _serious?”_

He’s _grateful_ when Ari repeats, “ _Limbo?_ ” in this strangled tone he’s never heard, not even during acclimation training. He’s even more grateful—distantly, coldly—when she follows the definition Arthur provides, as he advances on Dom, with the demand, “What the hell is down there?” and she over-aspirates “hell,” like she’s wrenching herself out of another swear—because Ariadne wouldn’t.

He is grateful because answering her, elaborating, hearing his own voice break as he does, helps him to realize what he’s seeing.

Arthur is seeing three years with Dom Cobb, after Mal.

He’s seeing those years yanked inside-out. Torn apart at the seams.

He’s seeing that he has been a prop and a tool and a means to an end and nothing, nothing at all, beyond that, not to Dom, and that Arthur’s lied, cheated, stolen, _murdered_ , used every last atom of his past and present and _future_ life as fuel for the bonfire, the fucking beacon, that he’s tried to keep alight so Dom can find his way out, after Mal, even as Arthur himself has mourned her—

And by the time he’s staring Dom down, his voice stripped of everything because he’s got nothing left, he knows that—in the face of every ID and degree program and family connection and _moral_ that Arthur himself has sacrificed—the only way Dom has gone is further in.

***

Eames as Peter Browning has an hour alone with Fischer, down from twenty or more, after Arthur’s done with the first part of his thug routine. As Dom shoved Browning into the room where they’re holding Fischer, cuffed his wrist to a pipe, Eames had given him a look—one flash of lead-grey from Browning’s blue eyes, a slight creasing of crows’ feet that didn’t belong on Browning’s smooth, heavy face, not _saying_ anything, but just— _I’m here_. _Get on with it_.

If it was anything.

Upstairs, holding his mask balled up in his hand, Arthur stands and stares at the floor and works his jaw. He’s reviewing the hotel design, mentally, considering where sub-sec might aggregate and what he’ll have available for defense, on him and elsewhere, what he can repurpose, until a deliberate scuff sounds against the planks.

Not Eames, obviously. Too light for Yusuf. Dom wouldn’t dare—won’t dare, he thinks. Saito isn’t mobile.

That leaves Ari.

He’s not sure if he can face her, now that the job has gone—critical. Saito’s going to die; it’s only a matter of when. After that, Limbo. Fischer’s sub-sec is still gunning for the rest of them. And _she’s_ only here because of Dom, to _help_ Dom, no matter what he thinks—and Dom’s drugged her into premature brain-death. On her first job.

Now, she stops about three feet off, just out of arm’s reach. Hands in her front pockets, weight on one foot but nothing so blatant as a cocked hip—Ariadne, in posture at least. He doesn’t know where she’s looking because he’s not looking at her.

No matter what her intention, her reason for being here, she’s just as much the walking dead as the rest of them.

She’d been shaping up so well.

Very quietly, and in a vocal register lower than Ariadne’s, she says, “I’m not allowed to kill him, am I.”

Unexpected, from her. But the moment Dom mentioned Philippa and James—holding them up like a shield against the… the fucking _atrocity_ of dosing six other people _,_ people with their own lives, and dangling them all over Limbo—Arthur had seen it, in his head. Watched it play out.

Draw. Knock the safety. Aim. Fire.

Too close to miss.

No more Dom.

But that wouldn’t nullify the sub-sec, and it wouldn’t provide a safety net against Limbo, and when Dom lost himself to Limbo—and he _would_ —Arthur would have to live with the knowledge that _he_ had effectively orphaned his own goddaughter and her little brother. He had shut his mind’s eye against the image and kept his hands from even twitching toward his gun. “No,” he says now, “you’re not.”

“He just told Saito to fucking _breathe_.” There’s barely any air behind it, but her rage and disgust are coming through loud and clear. “With a perforated fucking _lung_.”

In another universe, it might be funny, Dom’s uselessness. Now, here, Arthur just shakes his head, still staring at the toes of his shoes. Spectator-style, with anti-skid treaded soles and steel toes. The thing about dreams is bullying their details to your specifications. Granted, it only works for details. He can’t pull the team away from the abyss Dom has hung them over.

Ari breathes out a silent sigh and reaches out one hand, then rethinks, drops it, slots her thumb back into her pocket. Instead, she says gently—as gently as she ever is— “Hey. Could you look at me?”

His wording, three days ago, after he’d woken from her bullet to his head, after she’d nearly lost it from her first kill. It’s not as though the present circumstances are any less fraught.

Arthur swallows and glances over.

She’s looking up at him, face pale and set; her hair is still damp, starting to frizz. “Okay,” says Ari, nodding slightly, and then frowns. “No,” she mutters, brow furrowing, without blinking. “It’s not okay. Fucking _none_ of this is okay. _Fuck_ this job. Get that look off your face or I’ll punch it off you.”

He suspects the look is actually a lack of one. “It’s my fault—”

“I don’t _give_ a fuck whose fault,” she snaps, still too quiet to carry. “You’re the best person to get us through, now that we’re here— _Don’t_ argue.” Ari glares; Arthur closes his mouth. “You get info and you use it. To make sure the job goes off. By whatever means necessary.” Her eyebrows go up and her voice drops to nothing, a whisper driven by fury and conviction. “That’s what you told me being point was. So you’re going to fucking do it. That’s _not_ reassurance, that’s a fucking statement of _fact_ , you just don’t know it yet. Anything you say, anything you think is necessary, to get us through this shit—through the second level, I know the third’s up to the rest of us— _anything_ you say, I’ll do it. No matter what.” Ari swallows, and repeats, “You’re going to fucking do this. And we’re going to wake up and then we’re going to go to fucking Vegas. Yeah?”

Arthur marvels, a little, at what’s led him to receiving a pep talk veiled in threats from a rookie architect with too many degrees. “You can’t cuss the future into submission,” he says.

She snorts. “Maybe _you_ can’t. Tell me what we’re gonna do.”

Arthur nods, as he catches up with the rest of what she’d said—unquestioning trust. “I will.”

“No _shit_ ,” she says, sneering. “Your fucking job description. Tell me what _we’re_ gonna do, _after_.”

He laughs despite himself. “We’re going to wake up and go to Vegas.”

“We’re going to go to _fucking_ Vegas.” Ari tips her chin up, appraising, and then says, “Cobb in Limbo. You said ‘with Mal.’ What—” She stops.

He exhales and shakes his head. “You… know nearly as much as I do. There was—before, a few months—they were _exploring_ , he said, doing research, and an afternoon…went bad.” Dom had briefed him, sort of, days later in Pasadena; it was useless. _What do you know about Limbo?_ isn’t a good way to start any conversation. “That’s all I got.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” she says feelingly. “Fine. So my job is—fuck. Getting Yusuf away from Saito and ripping Cobb’s guts out. Metaphorically.”

“Keep it metaphorical.” Arthur tries a smile, one side of his mouth.

Ari nods, starts to turn, and stops herself. “You. Are you—all right?” she asks, suddenly tentative, voice very soft.

He lets the smile twist into something ugly. “Ask me topside.”

Ari presses her lips together, dips her chin—acceptance, for now—and turns. In her path back across the room toward Saito (Yusuf scoots off when he sees her coming), she morphs—adds a tiny swing to her hips, softens the set of her shoulders, tucks her hair behind her ear with a gentle gesture. Her first name gains two syllables as she loses six years in age and cloaks herself in understatement and deference and quiet helpfulness. “Mr. Saito—is there anything…?”

***

Once Fischer is out in the back of the van, Eames shakes Browning off like a dog and falls back into casual disgust at the universe. As if Dom hadn’t just held a gun to his _fucking head_.

But when he had, Browning’s left eye had shifted to grey and Eames had winked at Arthur before squeezing both eyes shut in dramatized fear. Or real terror. No way to tell; Eames would probably wink either way.

Now, in the sort of rudeness Dom overlooks, Eames opines about how fucked Fischer’s little head is. He also, incidentally or not—and it’s Eames, so—gives Arthur an excellent excuse to avoid looking at Dom as he demands, “This helps us _how?_ ”

Dom says something about catharsis and Arthur takes another swipe at Eames so he won’t murder Dom after all. And Eames squares up in response, straightens his spine and stares Arthur down. To anyone else it’d look and sound like the precursor to a good fistfight, but the absolute dryness of his reply— _I’m working on that, aren’t I?_ —is—god, it’s bracing. In thanks, Arthur narrows his eyes and orders, “Work faster. The projections are closing in quick—”

He dreams an assault rifle into his hands and goes to exchange rounds with them; practicality and a little stress relief. Yusuf and Dom are helping Saito into the van, and Ari’s lugging the dreamed PASIV device—there’s time, despite what he’s told Eames, which means he’s not even upset, really, at the first spray of brick fragments, the second of glass. He takes out one sniper, but there’s an entire squad on the roof diagonally across the lot.

Eames has followed him. He doesn’t look at him, just snaps off a one-liner ending with _darling_ as he hoists a fucking grenade launcher, but Arthur doesn’t need him to _look_. It’s enough that he’s standing here, aiming—

And the entire transformer array on the roof opposite explodes, along with the projections. Better than fucking fireworks.

As Eames turns and saunters back to the van, Arthur just catches his mutter. “There you are.”


	2. Chapter 2

The moment he’s aware of Ari next to him in the hotel lobby (as he’d decided to dream; easiest way not to lose someone, when you’re the one holding the level), he’s also aware that Ari is close to losing her shit.

The lobby itself is just like it was in the run-throughs—combine Arthur’s memory with Ari’s designs and they could build _galaxies_. Arthur’s suit is perfect. Ari’s pencil skirt and corset-waist jacket are visually cohesive, although he’s known since long before she first started bitching about the sleeves that he sucks at applying 2D images of outfits to people whose shapes differ significantly from his, especially if they’re not prepared to fuck with it themselves. Mal had never gotten off his ass about having to tweak the clothes he’d dreamed for her. He’d nearly jumped out of his skin when Ari unwittingly echoed her comparison of his mental tailoring to straitjacket chic.

But the _point_ , aside from how the skirt suit visually fits versus Ari’s vitriol about the _actual_ fit, is that Ari’s freaking. To a stranger, it’d look like poise, the stiff correctness of her posture, but as he points out Dom headed toward the hotel restaurant, Arthur can _tell_ that she’s drawn just as tautly as she was before she went to pieces at Dana’s, or during her interrogation of Eames that first day, months ago. It’s in the slowness of her motions, the angle of her head and the tight line of her throat, the careful distance and cadence of her tone as she asks, “Who or what is Mr. Charles?”

Could be his own fault. In the van, she had _frozen_ , in the middle of setting her cannula, as he’d reminded Dom of Stein’s projections. Possibly too graphically—Eames had shot him a very pointed look as he’d said, extravagantly cheerful, “Excellent. Then you learned a lot, right?” And Ari had resumed breathing and gone on hooking herself up.

Could be the knowledge that they’re off-script. Sure, onto another script, or the template for it, but Arthur can’t be pleased that it’s the Charles one, although nothing’s exploded down here. Yet.

Hell, it could be plain existential. There’s no small stress in just _being_ here, if you think about it, two levels deep in not-quite reality with someone else’s brain calling the shots and far too much at stake.

He buries the lede to buy time, casting about for something to get Ari back off the edge, _not_ mentally reciting all the ways the job is going to shit. _Think like Eames_. “It’s a gambit,” he says, discarding one half-plan after another as he looks out at the lobby, “designed to turn Fischer against his own subconscious.”

She turns her head to look at him; he doesn’t meet her eyes. “And why don’t you approve?” she says coolly, but there’s too little inflection in it—she’s clamping down on panic, and buying time, he realizes, is just going to make it worse. Eames is walking past the front desk below as a blonde with Mal’s shoulders, wearing a strappy minidress and strappier heels. _Come on, think._

“Because it involves telling the mark that he’s dreaming,” Arthur replies, because there’s no point in not telling her the truth. Ari looks away, back out at the lobby, just as Eames passes her line of sight. “Which involves drawing a lot of attention to us.”

“Didn’t Cobb say never to do that?” Nearly a laugh there, but that’s not sufficient—

Arthur _hmms_. “So now you’ve noticed how much time Cobb spends doing things he says never to do.”

She smiles, but it’s hiding a grimace; Ari hisses, “Kinda hard to _miss_ ,” and Arthur has to stop himself from flinching. He doesn’t _want_ her to tell him what she’d found in Dom’s dreams, but Dom going down alone—it’s bound to have been memories, and— Ari shifts on the bench, moving like she’s easing her weight away from black ice. “I beg your pardon,” she murmurs as the light changes, afternoon sun overtaken by heavy grey raincloud. Her tone is distant, more formal than she’s ever been with him, even as Ariadne Finch at a job interview. “It isn’t your fault, and it’s unfair of me to act otherwise.”

He opens his mouth to reply— _shut the fuck up_ , as kindly as possible, _why_ can’t Eames be here—but the entire building shakes then, a self-generated quake. As one, every projection in the lobby lifts their head and turns their face toward him, like he’s the sun and they’re flowers considering a Caesar-style assassination by mob. Ari starts and stares around as the lobby rumbles, as a wave of rainwater sloshes ( _wrong_ , wrong motion) against the glass doors. “Sh— _shit_ —what’s happening—”

Arthur sighs, silently, and almost wishes he’d shot Dom back when he’d thought of it. “Cobb’s calling Fischer’s attention to the strangeness of the dream,” he says, trying to be as matter-of-fact as possible about it. “Which is making his subconscious look for the dreamer.” And probably Yusuf is having a hell of a time with the van in the rain, which isn’t fucking helping. “For me.” He works his jaw and— _there_. Idea. He’s an Eames-level _genius_ , if this works— “Quick,” he says, and leans toward her. “Gimme a kiss.”

She’d promised she’d do whatever he asked, and she’s as good as her word; without missing a beat, Ari turns and presses her mouth against his. To his surprise, she lingers, significantly longer than he’d have guessed of don’t-fucking-touch-me Ari, even after she’d crashed out with her face in his sweater once torture nightmares had chased them both out of Dana’s house a couple days ago. It’s a bit longer than seems typical for a couple of yuppies attending the same business conference, but she reads young for corporate, so it could come off as nerves.

And besides, realism is far from the goddamn point of the exercise. Arthur looks past her, over her shoulder, to keep watching the lobby. In life, at Dana’s, she’d smelled variously like dust or isopropanol or fear-sweat; on the plane, like mint and rosemary, probably from hotel shampoo. Here, in the dream, she smells of… nothing. Specifying olfactory signatures beyond what the limbic system provides automatically is too dangerous in dreaming for extraction purposes—scent is too deeply wired, too easy to fuck up. So, apparently, his amygdala and hippocampus haven’t mapped Ari’s yet.

The projections keep watching him—they’re still going about their business, whatever form Fischer’s subconscious business takes when it’s guided into the shape of a good financial-district hotel, but each and every one looks at him, makes clear eye contact. Some glare outright, faces set somewhere between disapproval and hostility. _Thanks, Dom_.

He pulls back and settles facing forward; Ari twists, glances back at the lobby, and she’s _worse_ , he can tell in his peripheral, moving like she’s about to fly apart— “They’re still looking at us,” she says, and she sounds stark terrified.

After a beat, Arthur says, all on one wry exhale, “Yeah, it was worth a shot.” And then glances at her.

For a flash of a second, he is acutely aware of the nonzero probability that Ari will dream her fingernails into claws and disembowel him right here, Limbo or not. He doesn’t let that into his voice when he adds, “We should probably get outta here.”

And she relaxes. She gets it, every layer of it at once, the con of distracting the projections over the fake con of Arthur making up an excuse to kiss her (so thoroughly a non-starter it’s probably going backward) over the _real_ con of playing something ridiculous enough to put her at ease. It’s slow, but the tension goes out of her and she looks like she’s about to laugh, Arthur thinks, as he stands and moves off. Victory. Nearly as good as a grenade launcher.

Everything since they came under is still simmering under his skin; Dom _dosing_ them, Yusuf selling them out, the militarization getting past him, trying to outpace Saito’s bullet wound, _Dom holding a gun to Eames’s head_. So, even with the risks—fuck it, _because_ of the risks—Arthur relaxes his mental grip, just a little, here, two levels down. The least he can do is ensure that the elevator ride to the fourth floor contains _only_ known variables: himself and Ari.

Arthur became acquainted with the peculiarities of his own subconscious during his first encounter with Somnacin, as an undergrad in a research lab, accompanied by a master’s student whose stipend was _far_ too low for this shit. His projections had swarmed them while he was still pelting the woman with questions. She’d gamely kept trying to answer until he realized the projections were targeting _her,_ not _them_ —and until three of them had dislocated her shoulder.

She had yelled, taken out all three with a fucking submachine gun that hadn’t existed until right then, then snarled _fuck this_ and shot him as well. Then, apparently, herself. The second she got him to stop babbling apologies to her (he’d done coffee runs for her for the rest of the semester), she handed him off to one of the neuroscientists who focused on, well, _focus_ , on compartmentalizing, on the iron grip and surgical precision of _control_ of one’s own mind. When that neuro—an ancient Southeast Asian Ph.D. who used genderless pronouns as if they were the declension reserved for gods—had finished with Arthur, they had pronounced him a weapon of mass psychological destruction in the skin of a teenage wannabe biohacker.

And that was _before_ the military got to him.

In other people’s heads, Arthur has essentially the same restrictions that others do. He can’t build and he can’t forge (except for that one time five years ago when he managed, for half a subjective minute, but he’s never been able to replicate those precise conditions of irritation and sleeplessness and malleable half-frustrated hilarity since; something about Eames that particular day). However, projections from other dreamers—strangers—tend to steer clear of him.

It’s nothing so dependable as a shield. When he’s holding a level, it’s even less reliable, with the subject’s mind casting around for the source of all this alien structure, the consciousness guiding the narrative. Still, when he has the opportunity to loosen his hold on his own personified symbolism-laden mentality, it’s like the projections _know_. That on equal ground—given the same neurochemical workup, the same freedom, the same _lack_ of control—Arthur, or the legion embodiment of his will, would have them on their knees in seconds, blades to their throats.

So even though the entire lobby is watching him as Ari follows him away from the bench—she _is_ smiling—he settles his shoulders and shoots his cuffs and what do you know, the small crowd of projections at the elevator bank disperses, scatters. There’s no line, the nearest elevator opens meekly the second he presses the call button, no one follows them into the car, and the door rolls shut almost on the heel of Ari’s left shoe.

She flinches back from the door, smile gone, and straightens quickly, hand going to her hair—but there’s nothing to play with, no strands to tuck behind her ear, because it’s all up in the twist he borrowed from Marie de Luce-Miles. Ari drops her hand and flexes her fingers, nearly as tense as she had been before the whole thing in the lobby.

Too much to ask, apparently, for the layered ploy to work longer than a minute. Arthur watches her out of the corner of his eye, wishing again that Eames were _here_ instead of off being strategically distracting. Just as the elevator ticks past the third floor, Ari says through her teeth, “Quit staring, asshole.”

“All right,” he says, and stops looking.

He lets himself feel a little proud of the hotel’s furnishings; it’s not what he’d live in, but it looks like it would be, for the person he is in dreamshare. They’ve never done the actual two-layer synched kick, so he explains it to keep her out of her head as he sets the plastic explosive. He reminds her of the music Yusuf will play, the three-minute marker (ten seconds, on Yusuf’s level) before Arthur trips the detonator.

Ari’s still a little slow, asking why Arthur’s own kick here has to happen before the van backs off the bridge—but, shit, she’s never worked in a moving environment; they’d never _thought_ to demonstrate how lucid dreams translate upper-layer disturbances. He hides his own annoyance with himself at the oversight—a _massive_ one—and works the explanation of freefall on the first level meaning zero-g on the second into a stupid, showy little visual pun—pure Eames, although Arthur prides himself on his understated delivery. She catches it regardless, smiling as she says, “Right.” Then she narrows her eyes. “Wait. _If_ you missed it, here would be zero-g but the third level… I guess—no, Eames’s frame of reference would only have the one major jerk—”

“Is that an insult?” Arthur asks mildly. The _if_ case, he’s decided, isn’t worth his time until he starts hearing Piaf.

“It’s _physics_ ,” she snaps, but she grins a little as she follows him up to the fifth floor.

***

Somehow Dom’s gotten Fischer to trust him, although Fischer looks sick with fear. Arthur plays secret agent–utility cop, retrieves the PASIV machine from the cabinet below the sink in 528’s bathroom, throws it open on the bed, and hushes Dom and Fischer when he hears someone trying the door. _Not in the script—_

His stomach clenches as he grabs Browning’s wrist, kicks his feet out from under him, and holds his gun to his head. But no, this isn’t Eames—he doesn’t signal in any of the dozens of ways he could. This is Fischer’s projection of the real Browning and now Fischer looks _really_ sick, going-to-puke sick, as Dom says, “And you _saw_ them torture him.”

Fischer protests, and then stares, eyes going watery, and puts what’s in his head together out loud. Browning ( _Fischer’s_ Browning, _not_ Eames) had hired the kidnappers (Arthur and Dom—and Eames and Yusuf and Saito, everyone but Ari, from the top level) to get the combination to the safe that doesn’t exist. To get to the will that doesn’t exist, the one formalizing the breakup of Fischer Morrow that Maurice Fischer never in his life intended (as far as they know), and it hits Arthur once more that Jesus, this job is _fucked_ —

And Fischer’s Browning confirms it all, says that he couldn’t let himself give Fischer the chance to do as his father challenged him. Says that Maurice Fischer thought there was no way Fischer could succeed independent of Fischer Morrow, but that Browning thought he _could_ , and _holy shit, it’s working_.

“Mr. Fischer,” Dom says magisterially, putting his back to the rest of the room, “he’s lying.”

Ari casts Arthur a look that says _what the fuck_ , and he can’t respond properly; he tightens his mouth instead. He _thinks_ he knows what Dom’s doing. Inversions, denials like this—they’re a good way to get the mark to focus on an idea, to look at it from all sides. They’ve played shit like this in preliminaries as motivation, inducing the mark to cough up new info in context. So maybe—

Eames walks into 528; Saito’s on his heels. Arthur sets his Glock on the bed next to the PASIV case and jerks his head at Eames, who grabs the chair from the hotel room’s desk and sets it just behind Browning. By the time he’s got Browning seated, Arthur has the dummy PASIV line ready to sedate the projection. It’ll work—it starts working—on the projection because the dream tells it to, what Ari calls sloppy logic and Arthur considers efficiency.

“I need you to do the same thing that he was going to do to you,” Dom says to Fischer, in that weird register he’s mastered where it seems like he’s speaking privately, but an entire room can hear him clearly. “We’ll enter his subconscious—” Browning’s— “and find out what he doesn’t want you to know.”

“All right,” Fischer says, and when Arthur looks over, his eyes are overwide, slightly fanatic. He goes under next, Dom doing the needle work and then easing him down on the bed next to the PASIV. It’s wheezing already, feeding barbiturate derivative to both Fischer and the projection—Arthur will start the Somnacin drip once they’re all under.

“Wait,” says Ari, eyebrows up. “ _Whose_ subconscious are we going into exactly?” She’s taken a chair from the seating area past the bed; she looks long-suffering more than actually confused. The script is in shreds—the second one—and Dom sounds like he knows it as he answers.

Regardless, the plotline is far neater than Arthur had anticipated. Another improvisational masterpiece by Dom fucking Cobb. “He’s gonna help us break into his own subconscious, huh.” He looks at Dom as he says it, feeling admiration in spite of everything. Dom won’t meet his eyes, and Arthur’s stomach clenches again as he goes to Saito with a new cannula and one of the active lines.

Eames sits right on the floor as he sets his needle; he looks up at Arthur and fake-smiles, a tight humorless thing. Arthur brings a line over—he could trick himself into amused contempt that Eames didn’t have it already, or he could accept it as Eames’s way to make goddamn sure they speak before Eames drops out of the hotel—and takes a knee. “Security’s going to run you down hard,” says Eames quietly, holding up his wrist and settling on his back. His eyes are narrowed, something like concern in the set of his eyebrows.

“And I will lead them on a merry chase,” replies Arthur, just this side of overly solemn. _Here I am, asshole._

A real smile, fond and casual and easy as if Limbo were just a stupid party game, as Eames rests his head on the carpet. “Just be back before the kick.”

_And there you are_. “Go to sleep, Mr. Eames.”

When he stands, Saito’s out just behind him. Ari, to his left in her chair, is adjusting the bracelet around her wrist; she glances at Arthur and nods to him, quick and certain. _The third’s up to the rest of us._ She sits back, twists the line’s valve onto her cannula until it clicks, and slumps as the feed starts, wrist sliding off her lap.

Dom is sitting against the opposite side of the bed, staring into space. “You good?” says Arthur; Dom doesn’t so much as twitch. His gaze is fixed, directed toward the mirror above the dresser, but that could be anything, he could be looking anywhere, face unreadable. If it were any other time, his expression would look like—hope, almost, the raptness of a prophet awaiting a vision— “ _Hey,_ ” Arthur says. “You ready?”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” says Dom, and it’s among the worst lies Arthur’s heard from him in three years, but there’s no fucking time to check _now_ , as Dom sets the line against his cannula. “I’m ready.” He affixes the line without looking at his wrist, looking a million miles away until his eyes slide shut.

And that’s it.

He sighs, mutters, “Don’t fuck it up,” and presses the central button of the PASIV, triggering the Somnacin flow.

Once he straightens, the building shakes.

Then _swings_.

Arthur takes off his jacket and gets to work.

***

When the first projection falls on him, he sinks almost gratefully into action, the mechanics and strategy of combat. Hand-to-hand after he loses his gun, following the direction of gravity—what the _hell,_ Yusuf. He might have an edge on Fischer’s projections for that alone, because Arthur _knows_ he’s in the van, and his own proprioceptive sense has that context for what the hell is happening to it.

The dramatic ninety-degree pitch that tips the first projection into a hundred-foot fall down the sudden vertical canyon of the hallway leaves Arthur clinging to the hall ceiling, thanking himself for the varied elevations between pendant lights. Not like it’s much of a break; the corridor rolls and another projection all but falls on him, and they’re off again. He shoots that one with its own pistol.

Three minutes and twenty seconds after he starts hearing Piaf, the jolt of the van hitting the bridge barrier sends him flying. As he scrabbles for a grip on the ceiling he starts counting and digs in _hard_. The mental trick of deliberately missing a kick is—not a trick, really; it’s sinking your consciousness into the layer, forcing your way past the shock of the fall. It’s stubbornness multiplied by a thousand.

Arthur is good at stubbornness.

When he’s got himself stabilized, his mental count hasn’t yet hit four and he’s only a few feet from 528’s door; not bad. The fall itself is two and a half seconds on the first level, unless Yusuf starts fucking around—but there’s no way to tell, and the point is that Arthur, here in the hotel, has just under fifty guaranteed seconds of zero-g. There’ll be a jolt when they hit the water, then reduced-but-not-zero for another hundred and forty, until the van and his frame of reference go still— _frame of reference_ , he thinks, staring into 528, and the plan for new kick comes together eight seconds in.

He retrieves the Semtex before eighteen seconds have passed, thanks to a connecting shaft he sinks through the ceiling of 491. Fuck attracting attention; the projections don’t have zero-g training, and he’s taken care of all the locals.

With the Semtex in its bag across his back, guiding the cord-wrapped stack of his team along the corridor—leaving the Browning projection floating serenely in 528—goes quickly; he uses those raised bits on the walls (fuck if he knows the right terms; he knows what they _look_ like, and he knows they’re goddamn useful) to propel himself, and they trail along. They’re set safely in the elevator— _safely_ being relative; he’s certain Saito will die before he comes back—with twenty-five seconds to go. Fifteen, counting the time to cue Eames.

Arthur swarms out the ceiling hatch and gets the right cables cut, wondering how they’re actually doing a level down. The shit that’s been throwing Arthur against the ceiling since they went under (and thank Somnacin and the fucking military for barely feeling the number of ways he’s beaten up)—on the third level, with the sedative, _that_ deep, they’ll be isolated from all of it.

At least, they should be.

He doesn’t know for sure, and won’t until they’re out, because three-layer dreams are fucking _unheard of_ , unless you’re Dom, in which case they’re your fucking Wednesday afternoon when the kids are at a playdate with their nanny—

He decides to stop thinking about Dom.

As his count hits thirty-eight—Jesus _fuck_ , but he can’t move any faster—he places the last of the Semtex on the underside of the elevator car. He scrambles back up along cables and weld seams into the car, and then down along the interior using the wall paneling.

As the count hits forty-five— _Christ_ —he slips the headphones onto Eames’s ears and cues the music for him and thinks _please be enough_. He doesn’t know who he’s asking.

Arthur maneuvers using the handrail, bracing himself between it and the floor in the opposite corner (his count hits fifty; nothing happens; _Yusuf, what the fuck_ —). Fischer’s at his feet, Ari next to him, then Cobb, then Saito’s corpse ( _fuck_ ), then Eames. The button panel is over Arthur’s head and the detonator is in his hand.

At fifty-three, with a directionless _please, fuck, please_ , he hits the detonator.

He can’t _tell_ if gravity’s back yet; the elevator car is riding on enough Semtex to take out a _hotel floor_ , but fuck if he knows the explosive force or the weight of the car, and their velocity when they hit the ceiling is an open fucking question, let alone how much they’ll retain after impact. This is the dumbest half-assed goddamn plan except for inception itself and if it doesn’t work he’s going to kill every physicist he meets topside, if he ever _gets_ topside—

—and the car hits the ceiling of the elevator shaft and rebounds as his count hits fifty-four—fucking _early_ , damn it—with negligible structural damage as far as he can tell. The shaft is ten stories, thirty meters; it’d be a two-and-a-half second fall with regular gravity but he doesn’t _know what goddamn gravity is_. At fifty-six, as they’re falling—but how _fast?_ —he sees, despite his fucked-up angle, because he can’t _not_ watch for it, with a terrifying level of detail like it’s through a scope, the exact moment Eames’s eyes slit open, a glint through his eyelashes. But Eames himself is across the damn car, so he doesn’t see Arthur; it’s not clear whether he sees anything before he blinks out of the level and _thank fuck_.

Fischer’s next; Arthur’s vantage doesn’t let him see the mark wake, but he knows the instant he’s gone.

Saito is dead, in Limbo, and neither Dom nor Ari is waking, and they’re going to hit the floor, and Arthur takes the dreamspace and punches the floor of the shaft downward another five, no, ten meters; maybe enough. The dream fights him, even without Fischer, and the pain in his head is near-blinding as he forces it to hold this new shape. The open hatch in the car ceiling is spitting sparks and ash and his vestibular system is going haywire—the van is torqueing—and they’re not _waking,_ and he clings grimly to the handrail and the dream itself as his autonomous instincts kick in a layer up, demanding his awareness as the van sinks into the river, phantom water on his face, lungs screaming at insufficient air, and Ari’s eyes snap wide open in her sarcophagus-calm face, and _Dom isn’t waking_ —Ari vanishes and the floor of the car crumples beneath him and _fuck you_ , Dom—

—Arthur lets go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (handwavy physics fudging because this timeline is implausible even considering the fact of arthur being arthur)


	3. Chapter 3

Dom is still, seatbelt fastened, eyes closed, face serene. Under ten feet and counting of water. Warm to the touch and his hand drifts up slowly when Arthur shoves at his shoulder, full-on _hits_ him—

 _Fuck you, Dom_ , Arthur wants to yell, and can’t, just loses air with a muffled bubble of a shout. Dom—dead on the third level— _how_ —

Arthur grabs Ari by the wrist and kicks up. When they break the surface, it’s still fucking raining. It’s been maybe ten minutes up here since they left the warehouse. Fischer and Eames’s Browning are nowhere in sight along the shore, which is probably good, but Arthur can’t exactly bring himself to track it— _if not here, then where_ —because Dom is dead, Dom and Saito, which means they’re in Limbo, and Saito is a mean motherfucker and maybe he’ll be okay, but Dom—

Dom’s not coming back.

He’s failed.

“What happened?” he forces himself to ask, once Ari has gathered herself into a sodden heap on the rocks beneath the overpass.

She looks at him, eyes wide and wary, and says, “Cobb stayed.”

 _Stayed_. Not _died_. Dom stayed. Dom _chose to_ stay.

Arthur wants to—

It’s not that he wants to kill Dom, in any meaningful sense; it’s that his first impulse is to off himself here on the riverbank, chase Dom down in Limbo, bring him the fuck back, and punch him out over and over until the sedative wears off and _then_ kill him awake.

He’s never been the most rational of individuals under stress.

“With Mal?” he says. Just nail the fucking coffin shut. Collect Eames and Yusuf and start working the problem, build a story and a plan to keep Dom’s body stable the second they’re topside—

Ari replies, “No. To find Saito.” Clear and firm, correcting a minor mistake in Arthur’s understanding.

He looks at her.

Arthur has never, even pinning her to the floor with his gun ready, wanted to hurt Ari. He doesn’t want to now; the concept of _want_ is faraway in the face of _Dom stayed; I failed_. But for a moment, he considers, absently, how easy it would be to dream a dry Glock and shoot her right between those wide eyes for thinking he’s that fucking _stupid_. The imagined afterimage, Ari slumping on the rocks, shocks him into critical thought. Sick at himself, he bites down hard on nothing, jaw clenching painfully. She doesn’t think he’s stupid. She knows, to the extent that he’s let her, what Dom is to him. She wouldn’t fucking—

She believes it.

It’s like watching Mal hit the street, and Arthur has to look away. “He’ll be lost,” he says, because he can’t say anything else, and because there’s simply no _way_ he can say any more, not without—He works his jaw, molars grinding. The river’s surface is wrinkled with wavelets and dappled with rain. All of it is grey. The entire city is grey, past the brown of Arthur’s own shoes at the bottom of his field of vision. Grey and nearly silent, except for the patter of water on cement, mud, more water, blending into a soft constant rush of—

Ari breaks it. “No, he’ll be all right.” It sounds like the conclusion of an argument with herself, where she’s pretty sure the arguments for outweigh those against. It sounds tired but convinced.

It sounds like bullshit, and Arthur looks at her again. Ari’s soaked hair drips onto her saturated shirt. Against the darkness of her jacket and hair she’s ghostly pale, and while her speech has been smooth enough, she looks like she wants to puke.

He has to look away again.

But there’s nothing else to look at, and Arthur can’t—everything he knows about Ari says that she believes what she’s saying, and he’s told her enough that he _can’t_ believe she’d encourage false hope. Not with—with Dom, the entirety of him. He turns back to her, uncertainty sick and heavy in his stomach, and opens his mouth to—he doesn’t know what he’s going to ask, what there _is_ to ask, what there is to _know_. But he has to find out, has to—

Ari stares back at him, swallowing. The skin around her eyes is translucent as porcelain, traces of blue veins like lacework at her temples, and her mouth is trembling when she pants for breath. “I’m not telling it twice,” she says, voice thin and high. “Don’t make me t-tell it—” She looks hunted, haunted.

She looks like Mal did, in the days after, before she was able to hide it, while her plan was still coalescing in the fragments of her world.

Ari is visibly shaking, her hands jittering as she digs her fingers into her own thighs, and _she was in Limbo_. It’s—Arthur can’t say how he knows, right now, but he’d swear it on Philippa’s head; Ari followed Dom down just like he knew she would, and now she’s here, and Dom isn’t, but whatever happened there, she thinks Dom might—might—

—she was in _Limbo_ —

The cost–benefit analysis is fleeting, a formality, because Arthur just—he can’t let her—he folds one arm over her hunched shoulders and she stiffens fractionally, then sags like it’s more energy than she has to protest, heavier than she has any right to be against his side. “It’ll keep,” he says vaguely, and realizes he’s shivering as well, shock and cold and… whatever. He wants her close, just to make sure she’s not—not a projection of her, although the projection wouldn’t have had time to take her place in the van, but then again, if he’s been dreaming the entire—

He puts that thought away faster than it appears. As soon as it goes, despair rises in him. A tidal force, three years culminating in loss— but no, he can’t put it like that, can he?

Because Dom _isn’t_ technically lost; Arthur knows where he is, in terms of consciousness and topside geography. Coming out of Limbo _isn’t_ impossible; he has two—no, three counter-examples. Mal and Dom, the first time, and Ari is right the fuck here, and maybe it’s too early to say whether she’s _well_ , but she’s _here_ , for fuck’s sake.

And it’ll be eight days, subjective time, before he’ll know the same of Dom.

So Arthur does what he’s so good at and puts the idea of Dom away, closes it off, awaiting new information. Yusuf joins them, and he starts thinking about next steps—surviving eight days in the dream, the stories for topside if they need be—before he remembers that this fucker _sold them out_ , and whatever they’re saying about contingency shelter, the deck is stacked against them in _so many_ ways, and in case Yusuf needs reminding, he can lay them all out—

Ari shoves him and snaps, “You don’t get to blame Yusuf for everything. It’s Cobb’s fucking fault.”

He freezes, staring at her, Yusuf’s presence suddenly irrelevant. _It’s Cobb’s fault_. Which—he knows that. Dom’s status right now doesn’t _change_ that. It’s illogical to…

Only then does he register the terror in Ari’s eyes, the stiffness of her shoulders—she’s holding herself away from him, waiting to see what he’ll do. And, right down to the stoic set of her mouth, it’s the look she wore throughout torture training. _How’s he going to kill me this time_ —Arthur is horrified, at himself and at what he’s done to her, and _grateful_ , because she’s still sitting here despite it, and he slumps. “All right,” he says, only half-aware of his words. “Fucking—fine. Okay. You’re right.”

Ari relaxes by a hair, and Eames appears, and Arthur might slump further against Ari—who bears it, tightening her arm around his waist for a fraction of a second—with simple relief at seeing him, and seeing him as himself.

Eames is _gleeful_ , despite everything, despite Fischer’s odd behavior, and Arthur starts thinking, as they all pick themselves up off the rocks and stand around Eames, that maybe this is… recoverable, maybe they’re not screwed, maybe he won’t spend the next eight days trying not to shoot himself.

And then everything fucking falls apart.

Because— _contingency, shelter_ —Ari built _backup_ for Yusuf. She _collaborated_ with him, with him and with _Dom_ , in this fucking deathtrap, and she’s telling him Dom will come back, and he _trusted_ —

Wondering at himself, for being so _fucking_ —tractable, gullible, willing to _believe_ , so simply goddamn _stupid_ , he says, “You were in on this,” and her face goes white as salt.

They’re arranged in a diamond, its sides a yard or so long, he and Eames facing each other on one diagonal and Ari and Yusuf on the other; Ari is turned to him, and he and Eames are both facing her. Yusuf’s gaze darts among the three of them.

A group dynamic he’d never considered, hardened criminals versus a rookie and a dilettante.

Ari looks—Jesus, like he just ripped her heart out of her chest, shock and horror in every millimeter of her expression, so raw and real it only hits him now, like a punch—another one—how closed-up she’s been nearly the entire time he’s known her. How he’s only seen her surfaces except when she _couldn’t_ keep her shields up—and simultaneously he realizes that Ari, unlike Eames, can’t fake it when it matters, and that _this,_ the team’s trust— _his_ trust—matters to her, down to her marrow.

That he’s wrong.

That Yusuf is telling the truth (right now; he’s speaking, although it sounds as distant as if he’s in another dream): she didn’t know the deal Yusuf had struck with Dom.

Glancing rapidly between Arthur and Eames, Yusuf says desperately, “I _never_ told her why, not in so many words—”

Eames interrupts, cool and polite and venomous. “Yet now’s the first we hear of it,” he says, and Ari’s eyes flick to him. “Why’s that, I wonder? Perhaps Cobb—” Ari jerks as if electrified at the name, turning her head so quickly her neck cracks— “asked that you keep it quiet?” Eames watches her, one eyebrow arched, and Arthur switches his focus to Eames’s hands. This, light and cold and driven by instinct and adrenaline, is when Eames is most dangerous, and if Arthur has to, he’ll tackle him. Even though he doesn’t have evidence backing it—fuck, even if she _is_ in on it, he can’t just watch his team send each other to Limbo, regardless of his own aimless idiot _thoughts_ , he _can’t_ — “What was your price, then?”

Ari lunges. Arthur has no hope of getting in front of her.

She’s snarling, “ _You shut your fucking mouth_ —” and ends up on her toes, practically chest-to-chest—chest-to-waist, Jesus—with Eames, face upturned and teeth bared no more than two inches from the tip of his nose, his neck bent at an absurd angle. “Scum-sucking _bastard_ , you fucking—” Her spit flecks his cheeks and he’s not _breathing_ , he’s gone so still, but Arthur sees the exact moment Eames realizes what Arthur had, about Ari’s relative expertise in playing a role, about what she can and can’t hide. Ari barrels on, voice rising to a shriek, “You were ready to _leave_ us, you were gonna watch Saito _die_ and just fucking _waltz off_ , and _you fucking dare_ —”

Eames steps back, away from the towering rage of their tiny architect. Which is kind of priceless, or it will be, if they survive this, if Dom ends up surviving this, and no matter what, it’s going to be eight days, _minimum,_ until he knows, and that brings them back to the revelation that started this shit. If Yusuf had Ari build the bunker, it’s probably their best bet.

When in doubt, do what you do best. Arthur arms himself, makes a decision, and dispenses orders. “Might as well check,” he says, as blandly as he knows how, which is _very_. “Eames, you take point.”

Eames looks at him over Ari’s head; she’s turned halfway, eyes on him, such desolation in her face that he can only glance at her and hope he can fix it later. Eames, though—his look says _you reckon?_ and _did you SEE that just now?_ and mostly _if you say so._

Arthur frowns minutely. _Yes, I fucking say so_.

“If you _insist_ ,” Eames sighs, world-weary, but it can’t be that bad, because he brings out the grenade launcher again. It’s as good as a neon sign, one reading I’M RIGHT BLOODY HERE AND WE ARE GOING TO HAVE _WORDS_ , SO HELP ME _._

He doesn’t laugh—an idea as foreign as _wanting_ —but he might smirk when no one’s looking.

The city is—beyond weird, beyond what he’s seen in anything but under-the-table experiments on compounds for inhibiting projection activity. But with those, the side effects on the actual subject had always been unmistakable, disabling, turning the projections foggy and the subject incoherent. This—the crisp, high-definition preservation of the city down to the last flaw in the lane marker paint, the watery sunlight shining on the cars and glinting off the wet asphalt and outlining the _people_ , the silent army of projections in their bland projection-clothes— this is new and surreally unsettling, the projections’ pristineness and their absolute lack of reaction to them, to the breeze, to the raindrops before they quit, to _anything_.

It’s almost dreamlike, Arthur catches himself thinking, and snarls at himself.

The bunker, once they arrive, is everything Arthur himself could have asked for in a hideaway; he could hug Ari, if she’d let him now, just for the layers of redundancies protecting their lookout points on the city. However, Eames isn’t over its existence yet, and needles Ari—not Yusuf; _Ari_ —about the place, demanding an inventory. Ari reels off a summary, affecting boredom as she sets her dreamed Glock aside. Double rations for six men, guaranteed water, a _shower_ — And Eames snips, “Quite the hideaway.”

Arthur can hear the undertone of self-disgust in there; Eames is pissed at himself—for not backing off?—not just at _her_. And, sure, it kind of grates that she hadn’t told him or Eames about it, but then, maybe that was part of her agreement with Yusuf. _And_ she’s the one who mentioned it under the bridge, so she disclosed when it was necessary, which is the most a team can ask for when there’s under-the-table bullshit happening—

“Now that you’ve so graciously allowed us to _use_ it,” Eames concludes, and internally Arthur winces. _Too far_.

Ari glares at him, disgust twisting her face into something uglier than he’s ever seen on her. When she speaks, her voice is low and rasping and _furious_. “Look, you wanna rip into me for your fucking paranoid bullshit—fine. I’ll use small words—” Ari lifts her head and manages to give the impression she’s looking down her nose at Eames, which is physically _impossible_ — “to explain what a fucking blithering idiot you are. But I’m putting on dry clothes first—”

When Eames repeats that, it’s half-wonder, half-judgment.

And Ari fucking explodes. Yelling, full-voiced, something about limits, limits and wet underwear and kicking someone off a roof and _shooting Mal_ and Cobb getting _stabbed_ , before she calls Eames forty kinds of bastard and storms off to the bunks, shedding her jacket as she goes.

Arthur stares at Eames, making sure he’ll stay fucking _quiet_ now, but the only thing Eames says is, “I _say_ , you needn’t—” at the same time that Yusuf sort of squeals, “We’ll turn around!” and Arthur turns his head to see Ari, bare to the waist—her back to them—flinging wet shirts to the floor.

“Get over it,” Arthur snaps to both of them in an undertone. “You can’t see shit. C’mon. Dry clothes.” He leans the assault rifle against the wall and goes to the middle dresser. T-shirts and sweatshirts in one drawer, joggers and pajama pants and sweats in the next, underwear and socks in the third, blankets in the bottom. All in solids and simple patterns, neutrals and dark tones, cotton jersey and fleece—perfect, really. Everything in this dresser is larges and XLs, which means there’s probably—

To his left, at the last dresser, Eames is toweling off his hair and muttering, “Got smalls and mediums here. You?”

“Larges. Here, swap—”

They toss each other clothes, sweats and t-shirts and pajama pants. Eames puts on fresh socks and stares at them until they’ve turned orange with little teddy bears woven into them. “Picky,” says Arthur as he arranges his wet shirt and jeans on a hanger. Ari sweeps past in his peripheral, draped in a purple fleece blanket like it’s a queen’s furs.

“Says the man collecting his dream socks to _fold_ them,” Eames replies, to which Arthur has no response. Eames smirks and changes the socks to goldenrod yellow. Ari speaks briefly to Yusuf and then heads back toward the couches, past the bunks.

When there’s nothing else for him to do but give Ari some time—she deserves it—Arthur says, “You done being a dick to her?”

Eames puts aside the sweatshirt he’s about to pull over his head and looks at him then. His face is drawn, but he tries to smile. “Quite,” he says thinly, and abruptly scrubs one hand across his eyes. “ _Christ_.”

“Hey—”

He sits suddenly, a marionette with cut strings. “She planned it all out,” he says, words fast and voice low enough that Arthur has to lean in to hear him, “a trip to bloody Limbo with Cobb like it was just another _exercise_ , and _Mal_ dead on the floor with Fischer, and Saito bleeding out—I’d no idea what happened to them until I saw you at the—all right, and I’m bloody— _Christ,_ I haven’t worried so much in my _life_ since—”

Without thinking, Arthur half-kneels on the bunk and puts his arm around Eames’s shoulders. Maybe gripping a little too hard, as the actual sense of Ari’s tirade a few minutes ago sinks in finally, and Eames’s own words. There was a point, on the third level, when Eames was in that fucking fortress surrounded by corpses and sleepers and armies of murderous projections and he didn’t, _couldn’t_ know if he’d ever see any of them alive and sane again, in the same way that Arthur—

“Hey. We’re okay,” he mutters, sudden and harsh, into Eames’s ear, because this isn’t working a problem, it’s fucking—it’s aftermath, and anything goes, after _that_. “Look, we’re—we’re up, and she’s fine, and you said Fischer’s squared away. We’re okay.”

“ _Fuck_ this job and _fuck_ being _okay_ ,” says Eames in a whisper, and it’d be funny, how much he sounds like Ari, but he shudders. Actually shudders. “D’you know, at the beginning, the only reason I agreed to come anywhere _near_ this job was knowing you’d be on it—” Arthur’s stomach lurches, breath catching in his throat. “And no matter how absolutely _mad_ —that you’d—” He stops, and almost inaudibly breathes, “Bugger.”

His grip on Eames’s shoulder is far too tight, Arthur realizes, and he tries to let go. They’re right up against the outlines of the thing they’ve been talking around for the last three months—Jesus, the last three _years_ — _now_ , and they’re both fucking—he doesn’t know if Dom’s coming _back_ , and Eames was alone among the dead and waiting—Arthur loosens his hand but doesn’t move it, rests his forehead against Eames’s temple, because he can’t actually make himself let _go_ , and instead forces himself to say, “Eames—” His voice is ridiculously small, and he can’t say anything else.

There’s silence, which is worse than anything, and then Eames says, gently as snowfall, “Never mind.” He turns his head to face Arthur, eyes steady. “Leave it for now,” he says, very low. “We’re—safe, and there’s quite enough to do, and—we’ll leave it for now. You’ve—lord, we’ve all been through it, haven’t we.”

Misguided competitiveness or something equally stupid makes him protest reflexively. “I can deal with—”

“Certainly, but you _won’t_ , because we’ve a job to finish,” says Eames, matter-of-fact. “And you’re right, of course—the little bird came through and the mark’s as settled as I can make him. We’ll just—”

“Table it,” Arthur finishes for him, like they’re going over any other plan, that seamlessly. “Work the job we got and—come back to it.” Arthur glances at him, to make sure he got it right, and Eames nods once, gravely. Arthur drops his arm then but stays seated, shoulder-to-shoulder with him. “All right. We gotta—once everyone’s settled, we’ll debrief. And I gotta talk to Ari.”

“I’ve got to persuade these trousers into being as objectionable as possible,” replies Eames, and it’s light, almost normal, and Arthur thinks they might manage this, navigating around the thing they’re both pretending not to notice.

“You’ll talk with her, too,” he says, somewhere between seeking confirmation and giving an order. “After debriefing.” Half of being point, on the job, is fucking counseling, just getting the team to fucking act like one, but he doesn’t _think_ Eames is actually going to argue.

“Oh, of course. But you’ll go now. You’ll both be easier for it.” Eames picks up his sweatshirt.

Arthur snorts. “I’m not the most strategic choice if you want her softened up.”

Eames pauses, his head and one arm where they should be in the pullover, and says thoughtfully, “D’you reckon that’s even possible?” Then he looks at Arthur. “I don’t need recce for the little bird. You need to settle with her, though. Sooner rather than later.” He gets a look at Arthur’s face, sighs, and puts his other arm through the correct sleeve. “Darling, she’s just been in Limbo and she doesn’t know whether the person she trusts most of this gang of idiots can still stand to be near her. _Do_ keep up.”

 _Shit_ , put it like that and— “All right, going.” And as he stands, “Shoulda seen your face,” because if Eames can be almost normal, he can at least help. “When she—”

“I was rather preoccupied with _her_ face and whether she was going to bite mine off, thanks—”

“Wish I had fucking video.” Arthur grins as evilly as he knows how, backing away, and is duly rewarded with a two-fingered salute before he turns to follow Ari.

They might just get through. And then—after—well, they’ll come back to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I wrote this because I love Arthur, and because ptgdp skims the dream itself, and because I felt like it. thank you for reading!)


End file.
